Sovereigns and subjects in the digital age

The Age of Discovery launched by travelers from the European continent in the fifteenth century intensified many of the least admirable practices of imperial rulership the world has known: colonialism, enslavement, extractive industrialization, environmental degradation, and relationships of economic and political subjugation whose memories and legacies still configure the spaces of the Global South (Davis, 2001; for a more nuanced analysis, see Sen, 2001). The territorial expansions of the digital age dawned with an altogether different promise: worldwide liberation and emancipation in a domain that seemed to offer equal access and autonomy to all comers. Echoing Kant’s famous definition of a science-driven Enlightenment of thought (Kant, 1996 [1784]), it was now technology’s turn to set people free from their self-imposed immaturity, not only in their reasoning but in their habits of being ruled. In virtual space, where hierarchy and control were allegedly absent, everyone would be at liberty to express their views directly, shape their identities, form their collectives, and fashion relationships in accordance with their social preferences. In a triumphant fanfare, former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow trumpeted a “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: the “Governments of the Industrial World,” those “weary giants of flesh and steel,” were passé, he announced. They had no home in digital territory, nor any sovereignty where the citizens of the “new home of Mind” would assemble and freely govern themselves (Barlow, 1996).